Olympics organisers say they could cancel Games due to Covid
The head of the Tokyo Olympics Organising Committee refused to rule out cancelling the Games yesterday if coronavirus cases continue to rise.
In a sign of the increasing schism between the group and the International Olympic Committee(ioc),toshiromuto vowed to maintain discussions relating to the local virus rate, and added, in a question which invited him to remove the possibilityofcancellation:"wewill think about what we should do when the situation arises."
The Tokyo Games will be the first to take place under a citywise State of Emergency. New daily cases have risen again to more than 1,000, with more than 70 Games-related personnel testing positive since July 1, including three athletes in the Olympic Village.
Frustration has grown over inconsistent quarantine measures for close contacts of a positive case, with
athletes allowed to train and compete after a single negative PCR test, while others, including the Japanese public, must endure 14 days in isolation.
Some members of the media who have been required to quarantine have found themselves sharing lifts and lobbies of supposedly sealed hotels with Japanese guests, whilst others have been able to subvert the three-day process seemingly at random.
IOC president Thomas Bach sought to strike a different chord in his opening comments at the 138th IOC Session in Tokyo, insisting the
Games could have "fallen to pieces" if the IOC had not taken the unprecedented decision to reschedule.
He said: "Cancellation would have been the easy way. We could have drawn on the insurance that we had and moved on to Paris 2024.
"But in fact, cancellation was never an option for us – the IOC never abandons the athletes.
"Imagine what it would have meant if the leader of the Olympic movement, the IOC, would have added to the already many doubts surrounding the Olympic Games, it would have poured fuel on to this fire.
"Our doubts could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Olympic Games could have fallen to pieces. That is why we had to keep these doubts to ourselves."
Friday's opening ceremony will also take place behind closed doors and is expected to be a dramatically scaled-back affair.